Building Swenson on a strong timeless vision
“We create unique experiences to empower creativity”
Before talking about Swenson, let’s remember what a vision is:
An aspirational description of what an organization would like to achieve or accomplish in the mid-term or long-term future. It is intended to serves as a clear guide for choosing current and future courses of action.
The vision for a company must be tough for years at a time. Technologies, apps, social netorks, people minds, all come and go, and a company must stay relevant regardless. From the past experiences, we understood that you can’t base your company around current brands, technologies, trends, or other companies. Some people would say that you can adapt yourself to what’s going on, but always better to adapt your company to your own moves. It has to be a long term thinking. It’s about what you are doing for your customers.
What is a vision built of ?
A vision lets you set goals that define your path and progress. For each goal, whether it’s “200 leads” or “200k downloads”, you can plan a strategy for achieving it. A strategy let’s you choose tactics — different ways you can go about achieving it. Each tactic lets you pick your activities — the actual work that needs to be done to make it happen.
Yes, that’s a lot. Let’s pickup a specific example (Swenson)…
In practice there’s more than one goal, and as a result there’s multiple day-to-day activities. Here’s how that looks…
Setting a vision lets everyone know what direction they’re going, even in small teams (as we are). It helps you understand what activities are beneficial and which ones are valueless distractions. It tells you when to say no, and when to say yes. Internally, we illustrated our vision with a simple question:
“Does that add flavor to entrepreneurship/creativity?”
So each time we start a new activity, a new project, or want to onboard someone, we ask ourself this question.
A vision let’s you define those activities.
And this is why since the begining at Swenson, it helped us define our activities:
- A print magazine (to provide the right content)
- Workspace (to catalyse the right people)
- Events (to spread our vision)
The most difficult part is to evaluate the degree of investment in each activity when you don’t know the perspective yet (We’re still working on this one to improve it :D).
Hope it helps a little bit. This article is also a step to what’s coming next for Swenson. Make sure to subscribe to my stories :) and thank you for reading
